The electronic spreadsheet is a primary tool for tracking data and creating data-based plans. For example, a spreadsheet may be used to create a sales plan defining sales targets for one or more sales categories over various time periods. A spreadsheet may provide calculation functions as well, such that changing the value of a sales target for one sales category over one time period automatically changes the total sales target for the sales category over all time periods.
Modern business planning systems may partially or fully pre-populate a plan with values based on stored business data. As described above, a user may then change a value within such a plan. The changed value is then submitted to the planning system, all plan values are recalculated under the assumption that the changed value is fixed, and the recalculated values are displayed. Refreshing the plan after each value is changed may be unsuitably time and resource-consuming, particularly for large plans and/or slow systems. In a case that the user interface is located remotely from the planning system (e.g., a software-as-a-service planning system), the resulting round-trip of plan values may further hamper plan creation
Systems may address the foregoing by allowing a user to selectively refresh a plan. Specifically, the user may change any number of values within the plan and choose a “Refresh” user interface control to initiate transmission of the changed values to the planning system for recalculation of the plan values. This procedure presents difficulties because the user may easily lose track of which values have been changed since the last refresh and which values are the most-recently refreshed values. Moreover, neither of the foregoing systems contemplate cell fixation, in which a user desires to fix an unchanged value within the plan so that the value does not change upon refresh, but so that values determined based on the value may change.
Systems are therefore desired to facilitate plan creation.